To tell a story, put a camera on a cat.
/Write these special effects to yank your audience into the scene.
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In any story—the narration part of a speech, or a fictional tale, or the proofs in an essay—you want to put the scene right before the audience’s very eyes. Ancient rhetoricians called this quality enargeia. While the word literally translates as “visibility,” I prefer “before their very eyes.”
Here are a few ways to create virtual reality in a reader or listener.
1. Be all cinematographer.
Especially in the beginning of a scene, think of shooting a movie. You’ve got your establishing shot, locating the scene in space. Then try other shots: wide, close-up, tracking, etc. Peruse a list of camera techniques, then write cinematographically.
2. Put a camera on a cat.
I mean, try showing the scene through the eyes of a stray animal or person. Mick Herron, author of the wonderful Slough House novels, uses random witnesses to explore the seedy spy headquarters.
In Slow Horses, he uses an imaginary rider on the upper deck of a London omnibus. In Dead Lions, he actually employs a cat. It sneaks from floor to floor, observing each character and scoping each messy, sad space. A couple of the characters respond to the intrusion, revealing their personalities to both cat and reader. Here the animal reaches the office of middle-aged Catherine Standish:
Standish gets introduced in the novel by a cat.
“Catherine Standish ignores cats. Cats are either adjuncts or substitutes, and Catherine Standish has no truck with either. Having a cat is one small step from having two cats, and to be a single woman within a syllable of fifty in possession of two cats is tantamount to declaring life over. Catherine Standish has had her share of scary moments but has survived each of them, and is not about to surrender now. So our cat can make itself as comfortable as it likes in here, but no matter how much affection it pretends to, how coyly it wraps its sleek length round Catherine’s calves, there will be no treats forthcoming; no strips of sardine patted dry on a Kleenex and laid at its feet; no pot of cream decanted into a saucer. And since no cat worth the name can tolerate lack of worship, ours takes its leave and saunters next door. . .”
P.G. Wodehouse, on the other hand, prefers snails. In some of his stories, snails and slugs provide witness to the scene or add a bit of atmosphere.
“It was one of those still evenings you get in the summer, when you can hear a snail clear its throat a mile away.”
3. Slide in a simile.
Wodehouse’s snails work overtime, offering neat analogies that bring the reader right into the scene. Here he describes a woman’s facial expression with an “as if”:
“She was gazing at me in a divinely pitying sort of way, much as if I had been a snail she had happened accidentally to bring her short French vamp down on.”
4. Get real in the details.
Note that Wodehouse doesn’t have the woman accidentally step on a snail. He makes a very specific shoe, worn by a woman with clearly fashionable taste, do the squashing. Dan Okrent, a legendary editor, told young writers that he didn’t want to read how a good time was had at the luncheon. He said something like (I wish I could find this quote!), “I want to know the crisp mouthfeel of every stuffed radish.” Unless the menu included snails, obviously.
5. Use the present tense.
A small boy tiptoed down a dark hallway toward the strange sound.
Well, that happened. Whatever mystery or horror that the boy will discover has already occurred. Instead, let’s live in the now!
The small boy tiptoes down the dark hallway toward the sound.
Besides the present tense, note that it’s no longer a generic boy. It’s the boy. And the sound. Specificity brings the reader closer.
6. Try the second person.
Even more reality-bending, let’s turn ourselves into the boy!
Still wearing your dino pajamas, you tiptoe down the dark hallway toward the sound.
The second person is tricky. It’s hard to sustain through a story, and the reader may resent having to wear dinosaur-print PJs. Still, try to yank the reader into your tale. While it rarely works, it gives you a better instinct for effective enargeia.
7. For efficiency, make a catalog.
The children’s book Goodnight Moon is a catalog with pictures. (See my previous post on the book’s rabbity argument.) But the catalogue champion of literature is James Joyce. In Ulysses, he introduces a character with a you-are-what-you-eat description:
“Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.”
8. Don’t forget the smell.
Mmm, that faint urine scent! Writers tend to ignore olfactory description, which is a pity. To bring someone into a scene, don’t forget to follow your nose. I just looked up the number of times smells enter a novel I published some years ago, and lost count at 20. The main character, a 14-year-old girl, actually explains her sensitive nose:
“Chemicals are like a mysterious alphabet, coming together in endless ways to make smell-words.”
Smell-words, cinematographic words, cats-eye words, simile-words, detail-words, now-words, you-words; and, of course, the catalog…all these words let your story come to life. As Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster put it (referring to his attempt to stir the emotions in a young woman while misquoting a Longfellow poem about shipbuilding):
“She starts. She moves. She seems to feel/ The stir of life along her keel.”
Exercise: Don’t Show & Tell
Rhetorician David Landes and I worked this up some years ago:
Pretend you’re supposed to present one or more of the following objects in front of an audience. The problem is, you forgot to bring them. Project the object like a hologram, using only enargeia, the skill of vivid description that makes a scene appear before your audience’s very eyes.
Superball
Lizard
Moon rock
Stolen copy of the Magna Carta
Slinky
Dick Tracy video watch
Fairy
Alka-Seltzer
Your favorite childhood pet
